Dev Diary #8: Rhombus Returns!

Hello everybody! That’s right, Rhombus has finally emerged, battle-weary from an onslaught of exams, and is ready to dive back into some gamedev! Yeah, the past few weeks have been pretty tough study-wise, but I’m glad to say that the worst of it seems to be over (at least for now).

It’s easy for me to think back over the past action-filled weeks and think that I haven’t made any progress on Ambience at all. Thankfully, that’s not entirely true. A little while ago I had the idea of keeping a personal log of all the gamedev-related things I worked on, just to remind myself that I’m still moving forward. Progress is progress, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant.

Here’s a few things that I achieved:

Line of sight. Tweaked the line of sight scripts a bit more (and hopefully for the last time). Changed the line of sight in corridors from a square region to a more natural-looking circular one.

Drowning enemies. Worked on “drowning” enemies in marshy terrain. Significantly nerfed experience yield from drowned enemies to prevent the mechanic from being abused.

Items. Tweaked the items menu so that healing items can now be used on team members! (I was fairly proud of this one, actually – it’s something I’ve had in mind for a while, but haven’t really got around to actually implementing it.) Ally characters also visibly sweat when their HP or SP is low, which has already proven useful for me in my playthroughs.

Music. Remade a battle theme for Clarissa from scratch (I wasn’t particularly happy with the one I had before, although I’ve kept it and might still use it.) Also tweaked the “prison liberation” theme slightly.

Text updates. Had a long spell of writer’s block re. the second boss battle; eventually decided to leave it for the time being and work on something else. Added exclamations from Vulcan when the player activates their Ambience powers. Also added a joke which was deliberately meant to be lousy, but in reality is so lousy that I’m considering changing it. (Or not.)
Went back to the boss battle, tweaked the cutscene slightly, and re-wrote the dialogue once more. It’s fairly short and punchy, and sets up the ideological clash between the Renegades and Foss’s Henchmen fairly well. I think I’ll leave it for the time being.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been lingering around the Mudreed Marsh mission for a bit too long, and I think it’s time to move on to bigger and better things. I’m definitely continuing the personal log, though – it makes writing progress posts like these much easier. It also makes gamedev much less overwhelming when you realise that you’ve been making more progress than you think.